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Title: Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein ISBN: 0-393-04984-1 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (19 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Not a Thorough Enough Analysis
Comment: After reading the New York Times Book Review write-up and a review in Newsday about Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future, I was excited that someone had finally written a book about the business in which I work. However, readers need to heed the warning: "Don't judge a book by its cover" (or, in this case, its title). I have worked in the book publishing industry for 15 years, and have seen firsthand a great deal of what the author describes in this book. It seemed that the beginning of each chapter captured me, as I personally related to what was being discussed. But after a few paragraphs in each chapter, the author digresses into biographical issues that lend no value or substantial insight into aspects of the general history of the book publishing business, which might affect or interest someone in the industry. With all due respect to the author (and I truly appreciate his attempt at such a work), the book is much too brief to live up to the hype I read in reviews touting it as some type of benchmark work. The author's analyses of the various aspects of the industry are simply not profound enough. He begins a discussion of a particular aspect of the business, and then maunders into a personal story, which is far from relative to general interest.

The book is a very quick-and-easy read considering the author's style, which was obviously maintained throughout (leading me to believe that he was probably his own editor; some sentences are nearly a paragraph long). His use of a William F. Buckley-like vocabulary was probably not necessary for the typical reader. As an editor, I was, however, impressed that I could find but one typographical error in the entire book.

I would not recommend this book for someone interested in starting a career in the publishing industry. It does, however, serve as an amusing little folk tale for those of us already in the business.

Rating: 4
Summary: A semi-optimistic perspective from a veteran bookmaker
Comment: Publishing is a notoriously conservative, unprofitable, non-linear line of business. The most fascinating parts of Epstein's book are his accounts of how he did something a little differently ("thought outside the box," to use a current cliche) and helped create something truly innovative and worthwhile--like quality paperbacks (Anchor Books) and the Library of America (uniform editions of carefully edited American classics on acid-free paper). While this book is essentially an extended essay on where publishing is going (as publishing houses become lesser components in larger media companies, and author advances for the turner-outers of blockbuster titles sap publishers of their resources and makes them unwilling to take risks on more significant literary voices), there are some interesting portraits of key figures from publishing's past, such as Horace Liveright, Bennett Cerf, and Donald Klopfer.

His key thesis, that the future of publishing lay in being able to obtain printed books on demand from ATM-like kiosks, is both hopeful and scary. It means that there will be no need for any title to ever go out of print, no matter how limited its audience. (Hopeful.) But will books produced in this manner be as satisfying to read, hold, and collect as any single title in the Library of America? (Scary.)

Rating: 4
Summary: Gone With The Card Catalog
Comment: The preface of BOOK BUSINESS mentions the very origins of written language: cutting or "scoring" a mark onto a board. He notes that "scorekeepers still keep score on boards". He might also have added that the early scoring was the first expression of binary code, the language understood by the tiny chips that run the giant scoreboards at the Super Bowl, as well as every other scoreboard or "computer" on Earth.

Epstein gives here a curious insider/outsider account of the book business over the last half century. He was decidedly inside when he began in the fifties, working with Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer to "publish" such legends as Nabokov and Faulkner. His anecdote of Nabokov is a gem. He runs into the author in the bar of the Paris Ritz in the early seventies. Nabokov, in a loud Hawaiian shirt and a loud Midwestern accent, raises a toast to Richard Nixon. Why Nixon? Because he believed Nixon would eventually triumph over the Viet Cong and that would lead, dominolike, to the fall of the Soviet Union, enabling him to return to his beloved homeland.

By the eighties Epstein and his ilk are being overwhelmed by mass market forces. Chain bookstores seem to be taking over the industry and reducing drastically the numbers of titles available for sale (and by extension able to be published). The pressure of real estate costs at the malls steadily reduced the selection at bookstores to a handful of bestsellers, "whose faithful readers are addicted to their formulaic melodramas". Publishers who in Epstein's early years were like intellectual families had by the eighties been reduced to mere distributors and advertisers. Between 1986 and 1996, he relates, "63 of the 100 bestselling titles were written by a mere 6 writers".

By way of hinting at what was to come, Epstein tells of meeting a man who in the 1950s described to Epstein in some detail...the Internet. Epstein liked and respected the man, Norbert Wiener, an engineering prof at MIT, but "dismissed this prophecy as science fiction". Courageously, Epstein admits his failure to take the prophecy seriously reflected "the limitations of my own worldview at the time and that of my intellectual friends who were increasingly absorbed in Cold War issues and felt that the fate of Western civilization depended upon the positions they took in their articles for Partisan Review or in their dinner party conversation". One sees the limitations of his worldview pop up again when he meets a man named Bezos, who is committed to changing the book business. After a fairly short time, Epstein pronounces Bezos to be "committed to an incorrect business model".

But in spite of revealing himself to be a bit of a mossback, Epstein also gives what I found to be one of the most exhilerating glimpses anywhere of what technology can do for the book business: A kiosk, containing an "ATM machine for books". In it, an integrated set of computer, internet connection, laser printer, and binder. You put your money in, type onto a keyboard what text you want--anything from a transcript of the Nixon tapes to a copy of LOLITA to a handbook of Siberian butterflies--and the computer downloads it, the laser prints it, and the binder binds it. It doesn't matter if it's "out of print". That phrase is obsolescent. It doesn't matter if the book is banned. The newly printed and bound book will fall into a slot like a can of Coke. Your wait will be perhaps 5 minutes in 2005, falling to 5 seconds in 2010.